Words, clouds, lists, material

I learned a technique a few years ago. It's not a particularly secret or innovative mode of behaviour, but because it was explicitly taught to me by a group facilitator and our collective temporally-conscious inputs as group members at one of the many support groups I've attended in the Big Smoke, it holds a special place in my hippocampus (or wherever it is that long-term memories are stored; I know and remember that it's not Broca's area).

Anyway all you need is a 1 pen, 2 paper, 3 the capacity to write lines & words, and 4 a meticulous, obsessive, goal-driven personality that constantly bombasts you with curious ideas that seldom mesh together except in the nether realm, like a series of bad staccato notes slightly off-tune from one another, written on the walls of an empty, desolate, and capitalistically barren grand piano ballroom - think a mix of Mr. Kalorium's Lonely Western Shoppe and a dusty composer's den. That or an automaton who can do it for you.

If you meet only 3/4 requirements for the technique, that's okay: you might get some benefit out of it just the same, but beyond the 50% and I make zero claims as to the efficacy of this technique for countering boredom and the growing unease at the lack of balance between your ego and your id.

You make lists.
It doesn't matter when.
This is a list.
But it's a faiku.
And then you cross off things that are done.
Again it doesn't matter when but convention seems to indicate that it's a good idea to cross something off at the end of the day, or, if you're feeling bold & disorganized like I sometimes just am, at the end of the week, fortnight, month, and - do I dare dream - the end of the year.

Anyway that's the technique that I claim as my own to make me feel like I accomplished something during some of my downspiral, Laura days. Remember her, reader?

Drawing art seems to help, too, just don't go submitting your *ahem* early works to OCAD anytime soon or else I might have some competition for my loosely abstract representation of what it's like to be a materialist obsessed with sounding cool in english. Or like, whatever, man.

Sharpie on construction paper